If she had been just a friend telling me about a job, I could have roared, ‘Fantastic news’, and bought drinks all round like the beery life-and-soul of the party she seemed to want. But not this sudden abandonment, from her, brandished without any warning.

‘If that’s the way you want it,’ I said stiffly. I got up and picked up my coat.

‘What are you doing now?’ she said.

‘I’m going home,’ I said. ‘Why should you care what I’m doing?’

As I turned to leave, I stumbled over a pile of newspapers. Raymond came stealthily out of his room, a watchful cat creeping from behind a row of bins.

‘Where are you going?’ he said.

‘I’m going home,’ I said quietly.

‘Why are you going? It’s early,’ he said. ‘We were going to play Monopoly.’

His reasonable voice made me feel sad and ashamed.

‘I know we were, son,’ I said. ‘But something happened. We’ll do that another day.’

Eve watched me from the sofa, her face stiff and cold, eyebrows raised. I shut the door behind me very, very gently, because I wanted to slam it so badly. No, not slam: I wanted to rip it off the hinges, smash it into tiny little pieces and set fire to the pile of broken shards that remained.

I waited at the bus stop for long enough to tell two beggars – both a few years older than me, one fat and boozy, looking like a rotten acorn in his beanie hat, and one with the stretched, hollow look of a heroin addict – that no, I didn’t have any spare cash. Then I smoked precisely two and a half cigarettes, inhaling deeply and frequently, before the red double-decker finally trundled into view, travelling at the speed of a tricycle pedalled by a fat and lazy child. It took forever, winding through King’s Cross and the pub-ridden thick of Islington and down into Dalston, with its African hair salons and Caribbean fruit shops.

It was one of those autumn nights when everyone looks pinched and sad, defeated by the city, as if the Tube delays and the exhaust fumes have nestled into every bag and wrinkle on their faces. The only places with any warmth were the African barber shops, still lit up for business. A barber was razoring a man’s hair and telling him a joke at the same time: they were both laughing. There were a couple of half-full beer bottles sitting in front of the mirror. I thought how nice it would be to go in and get my hair cut and have a beer with them there too, but I felt too white. I looked every time I went past on the bus, but I’d never seen a white person in there yet.